by Shannah B Godfrey

Created on: March 20, 2009   Last Updated: March 21, 2009

How Do You Cope with Losing Your Child?

DIMENSIONS

Being with my son, Michael, was like a carnival every day,

Like sunning ourselves on a warm beach,

Like having a bunch of extra cash,

Like snuggling into a thick comforter;

He was ice cream for dinner every night

And the perfect stand-up comic.

Now he's gone, it's like crawling through a heavy snowstorm,

Like rotted sauerkraut on my candy bar,

Riding a unicycle with a flat tire

Like a book with most of the pages ripped out.

How do you recover from the death of your child? I never thought it would happen to me. Our children are supposed to out-live us. A piece of me was buried with Michael. I wanted to crawl in bed and pull the covers over my head, but I couldn't. I had other children that needed me. They were hurting, too.

It's true what the grief literature says; it takes 15 months before I stopped feeling like I was going crazy. I had to get through all the holidays and birthdays without him for one year, plus three months, before the pain would start to lessen. The neighborhood gets over it in six weeks, then thinks you should too. Not so. It takes five years to feel "normal" again, but you never really get over it. My son died back in 1990, but it feels like yesterday if I think about it.

I came to a point where I realized that if I ignored the other children in my grief and pain, they would think Michael was more important or more loved than them, which is not true. But the loss of a child is so deep and so intense that you have a hard time dealing with the trivia of daily living. For the sake of those living, I forced myself to try to care about what shampoo was their friend's favorite, and other useless data. When you're dealing with questions of life and death, it becomes clear very quickly what's important and what's not. But the children still need you to care about their little interests.

Too many parents put up a wall between their heart and their other children. They invested so much time and love into the child who was taken away; they are afraid to invest that much again and risk losing it all. This is a mistake that affects the other children for the rest of their lives. I have even seen parents do it to their children born some time after the child's death; they never quite bond with the new baby deeply. They're afraid of the intimacy in case this one goes, too. In trying to protect their hearts, parents can destroy the self-esteem of the other children, who think something is wrong with them.

Knowing all

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>